Translation:Gd saw all that He
had made and behold, it was very good and there was evening and there was
morning the sixth day.

Vocabulary in this lesson:

הִנֵּה

Behold!

שִּׁשִּׁי

sixth

Now let me point out something that
I brought up in the first lessons where I talked about how the past tense in
Hebrew has a connotation of a “perfect” tense in other languages.That is, it means something was completed in
the past.Not only that but it was so
long ago that it has a similar connotation to the famed and cursed “pluperfect”
tense.

The word asah in this verse
contrasts with the aorist yaas used in the previous verses.That’s what gives the aorist its connotation
of events in rapid succession, and it goes back to my comment about Gd’s time
versus human time.From Gd’s
perspective, the six “days” went by rapidly, but Genesis emphasizes the start
and end of the process as something long ago with the past tense instead of the
aorist.

This is the last verse of chapter 1
of Genesis.Here is a website where you
can hear somebody read it in Hebrew.

This is not the end of the story,
however.Jewish commentators say
creation was not complete without Shabbat, the Sabbath, which has to occur every
seven days.So the Jewish division of
Genesis is different from the chapter division.The chapter divisions are useful when talking to non-Jews and masses of
people don’t know there’s any other way to split things up.That’s OK.They don’t care either.